Mick walked from the bedroom and made his way into the kitchen. He wore his Levi’s low on his hips and his hair was tousled from her fingers. “Are you embarrassed about something?” he asked as he moved behind Maddie and wrapped his arms around her.
“Why?”
He took the bottle from her hands and raised it to his lips. “You practically ran out of the bedroom and your cheeks are red.” He took a long drink, then handed it back to her.
She looked down at her feet. “Why would I be embarrassed?”
“Because you shouted, ‘I love you,’ in the throes of passion.”
“Oh, God.” She covered the side of her face with her free hand.
He turned her, placed his fingers beneath her chin, and brought her gaze to his. “It’s okay, Maddie.”
“No, it’s not. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you.” She shook her head and insisted, “I don’t want to be in love with you.” Her chest felt raw and tears stung the backs of her eyes, and she didn’t think it was possible to be in any worse pain. “My life sucks.”
“Why?” He softly kissed her lips and said, “I’m in love with you too. I didn’t think I would ever feel for a woman what I feel for you. These past few days, I’ve been wondering how you felt.”
She took a few steps back and his hands fell to his sides. This should be the best, most euphoric time of her life. This wasn’t fair, but as she’d discovered as a five-year-old child, life was not fair. She opened her mouth and forced the truth past the horrible clog in her throat. “Madeline Dupree is my pen name.”
His brows rose up his forehead. “Madeline is not your real name?”
She nodded. “Madeline is my name. Dupree is not.”
He tilted his head to one side. “What is your name?”
“Maddie Jones.”
He looked at her, his eyes clear. He shrugged one bare shoulder and said, “Okay.”
She didn’t for one second believe he meant “okay” like he was okay with who she was. He wasn’t connecting the dots. She licked her dry lips. “My mother was Alice Jones.”
A slight frown creased his brow and then he jerked back like someone had shot him. His gaze moved across her face as if trying to see something he’d never noticed before. “Tell me you’re making a joke, Maddie.”
She shook her head. “It’s true. Alice Jones isn’t some face in a newspaper article that caught my attention. She was my mother.” She reached a hand toward him, but he took a step back and her hand fell to her side. She hadn’t thought she could be in more pain; she’d been wrong.
His eyes stared into hers. Gone was the man who’d just told her that he loved her. She’d seen Mick angry, but she’d never seen him so coldly furious. “Let me see if I’m getting this right. My father fucked your mother and I’ve been fucking you? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“There’s no other way to see it.” He turned on his heels and moved from the kitchen.
Maddie followed him through the living room and into her bedroom. “Mick—”
“Have you gotten some sort of sick pleasure out of all this?” he interrupted her as he picked up his shirt and shoved his arms through the sleeves. “When you came to town, was it your intention from the beginning to totally screw with my head? Is this some sort of twisted revenge for what my mother did to yours?”
She shook her head and refused to give in to the tears that threatened to fill her eyes. She would not cry in front of Mick. “I didn’t want to get involved with you. Ever. But you kept pushing. I wanted to tell you.”
“Bullshit.” He pulled the shirt over his head and down his chest. “If you’d wanted to tell me, you’d have found a way. You had no problem sharing every other detail of your life. I know you grew up fat and lost your virginity at twenty. I know you wear different scented lotion every day, and that you keep a vibrator named Carlos next to your bed.” He bent forward and picked up his socks and shoes. “For Christ’s sake, I even know you’re not a butt girl.” He pointed one of his shoes at her and continued, “And I’m supposed to believe that you couldn’t work the truth into any conversation at some point before tonight!”
“I know that it’s no consolation, but I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I’m not hurt.” He sat on the edge of the bed and shoved his feet into a pair of white socks. “I’m disgusted.”
She felt her anger rise up and she was amazed she could feel anything beyond the deep mortal pain in her chest. She reminded herself that he had a right to be furious. He had a right to know early on whom he was getting involved with instead of after the fact. “That’s harsh.”
“Baby, you don’t know harsh.” He glanced up at her, then looked down as he put on his black boots and tied the laces. “I spent an hour tonight trying to defend you to my sister. She tried to tell me not to get involved with you, but I was thinking with my cock.” He paused to let his gaze rake her up and down. “And now I have to go tell her about you. I have to tell her you’re the daughter of the waitress who ruined her life and watch her come apart.”
He might have more right to be angry than she did, but hearing him call her mother “the waitress” and worrying more about his sister than her scraped her raw emotions and pushed her over the top. “You. You. You. I am so sick of hearing about you and your sister. What about me?” She pointed to herself. “Your mother killed my mother. At the age of five, I moved in with a great-aunt who never wanted children. Who showed more love and affection for her cats than she ever did for me. Your mother did that to me. I’ve never been given so much as a second thought by you or your family. So I don’t want to hear about you and your poor sister.”
“If your mother hadn’t been sleeping around—”
“If your father hadn’t been sleeping around with about every woman in town and your mother hadn’t been a vindictive bitch with a healthy dose of psychosis, then we’d all be happy as clams, wouldn’t we? But your father was sleeping with my mother and your mother loaded a pistol and killed them both. That’s our reality. When I moved to Truly, I expected to hate you and your sister for what your family has done to me. You look so much like your father that I expected to loathe you on sight, but I didn’t. And as I got to know you, I realized that you are nothing like Loch.”
“I used to believe that until tonight. If you are anything in the sack like your mother, then I get why my dad was ready to walk out the door and leave us for her. You Jones women drop your clothes and the Hennessy men get stupid.”
“Wait!” Maddie interrupted him and held up one hand. “Your dad was going to leave? For my mother?” Her mother had been right about Loch.
“Yeah. I just found out. Guess you have something to put in your book.” He smiled, but it wasn’t pleasant. “I’m just like my dad, and you’re just like your mother.”
“I am nothing like my mother, and you are nothing like your father. When I look at you, I just see you. That’s how I fell in love with you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you see, because when I look at you, I don’t know who you are.” He stood. “You aren’t the woman I thought you were. When I look at you now, I feel sick that I fucked the waitress’s daughter.”
Maddie’s hands clenched into fists. “Her name was Alice and she was my mother.”
“I don’t really give a shit.”
“I know you don’t.” She stormed out of the room and into her office, only to return a few moments later with a file and photograph. “This was her.” She held up the old framed picture. “Look at her. She was twenty-four and beautiful and had her whole life ahead of her. She was flighty and immature and made horrible choices in her young life. Especially when it came to men.” She pulled the crime scene photo from the files. “But she didn’t deserve this.”
“Jesus.” Mick turned his head away.
Maddie dropped everything onto the dresser. “Your family did this to her and to me. The least you could do is say her go
ddamn name when you talk about her!”
Mick looked at her, his brows lowered over his beautiful eyes. “I’ve spent most of my life not talking or thinking about her. I’m going to spend the rest of it not thinking about you.” He reached for his wallet on her bed, then walked out of the room.
Above the sound of her beating heart, Maddie heard the front door slam and she flinched. That had gone worse than she’d imagined. She’d thought he’d be angry, but disgusted? That had hit like a punch to the stomach.
She walked to the front door and, through the peephole, watched his truck pull out of her driveway. She locked the deadbolt and leaned her back against the solid door. The tears she’d refused to shed filled her eyes. A sound she almost didn’t recognize as coming from her broke past the emotion in her chest. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she slid down until her butt hit the floor.
“Meow.”
Snowball climbed into her lap and scaled the front of her robe. Her tiny pink tongue licked the tears from Maddie’s numb cheek.
How was it possible to hurt so much but feel absolutely hollow inside?
Chapter 16
Meg raised her fingers to her temples and pushed, like she had as a kid. “She shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.” The ends of her pink robe flapped about her ankles as she paced her small kitchen. It was nine a.m. and luckily her day off work. Travis had spent the night with Pete and was blissfully unaware of the turmoil brewing within his home.
“She shouldn’t be allowed to live here,” Meg ranted. “Our lives were fine until she showed up. She’s just like her mother. Moving to town and messing up our lives.”
After Mick had left Maddie’s house, he’d gone back to work and tried to ignore the anger and chaos in his soul. After the bar closed, he stayed and worked on business. He looked over his bank records and wrote out payroll checks. He checked inventory and made notes on what he needed to order, and after the clock struck eight, he drove to his sister’s.
“Someone should do something.”
Mick set his coffee on the old oak table where he’d eaten dinner as a kid and sat in a chair. “Tell me you’re not going to do anything.”
She stopped and looked over at him. “Like what? What can I do?”
“Promise you won’t go anywhere near her.”
“What is it you think I’m going to do?”
He simply looked at her, and she seemed to deflate before his eyes.
“I’m not like Mom. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
No, just herself. “Promise,” he insisted.
“Fine. If it will make you feel better. I promise that I’m not going to burn her house down.” She laughed quietly and sat in the chair next to him.
“That’s not funny, Meg.”
“Maybe not, but no one got hurt that night, Mick.”
Only because he’d shown up in time to pull her out of their farmhouse the night she’d torched it. She’d always insisted that she hadn’t been trying to kill herself. To this day, he wasn’t sure he believed her.
“I’m not crazy, you know.”
“I know,” he said automatically.
She shook her head. “No, you don’t. Sometimes you look at me and I think you see Mom.”
That was so close to the truth that he didn’t even bother denying it. “I just think that sometimes your emotions are over the top.”
“To you they are, but there is a big difference between being an emotional person who rants and raves as opposed to a person who takes a gun and kills herself or anyone else.”
He thought calling her outbursts “being an emotional person” an understatement, but he didn’t want to argue. He stood and walked to the sink. “I’m tired and going home,” he said and poured his coffee down the drain.
“Get some sleep,” his sister ordered.
He grabbed his keys off the kitchen table and Meg rose to hug him good-bye.
“Thanks for coming by and telling me everything.”
He hadn’t told Meg everything. He hadn’t mentioned that he’d had sex with Maddie, nor that he’d fallen for her. “Tell Travis I’ll come by tomorrow morning and take him fishing.”
“He’ll like that.” She rose and walked him to the door. “You’ve been so busy with work lately that you boys haven’t had much time together.”
He’d been busy, but mostly busy chasing after Maddie Dupree. No. Maddie Jones.
“Take a shower,” she called after him as he made his way to his truck. “You look like crap.”
Which he figured was perfect, since he felt like crap. He jumped in his truck and ten minutes later he stood in his bedroom, wondering how his life had gone to complete hell.
He pulled his shirt over his head and caught a scent of Maddie. Last night she’d smelled like coconut and lime and this morning was the first time since he’d met her that he didn’t want to bury his face in her neck. No, he wanted to wring her neck.
He tossed the shirt in the laundry basket in his closet and took off his shoes. Standing in her kitchen last night, realizing who she was, had hit him like a blow to the side of the head. If that hadn’t been good enough for her, she’d held up the bloody photo of her mother, which finished him off with a roundhouse kick to the gut. She’d beat the hell out of him and he’d gone down for the count.
He took off his shoes and undressed. He was a fool. For the first time in his life, he’d truly fallen hard for a woman. So hard it ate at his chest like acid. Only she wasn’t who she’d led him to believe she was. She was Maddie Jones. Daughter of his father’s last girlfriend. It didn’t matter that she didn’t see Loch when she looked at him or that she looked nothing like her mother. It really didn’t matter that she’d lied to him, or at least not as much as knowing who she really was mattered. He’d spent most of his life fighting to free himself from the past, only to fall for a woman deeply tangled up in it.
Mick walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Evidently he was more like Loch than he’d ever thought, and that just pissed him off. From almost the beginning, he’d known there was something about Maddie. Something that drew him in. He hadn’t known what it was and couldn’t have even guessed. Now he understood, and it sat in his gut like hot lead. He understood that it was the same single-minded attraction his father must have felt for her mother. The same fascination that made him want to see her smile, watch her laugh, and listen to her whisper his name as he gave her pleasure. The same sort of calm his father must have felt when he was near her mother. As if everything else dropped away and his vision cleared, and he saw what he wanted even before he knew he’d wanted anything.
He stepped into the shower and let the warm water run over his head. For his father to have been planning to leave his mother for Alice Jones, Loch must have been in love with her. Mick understood that too. He was in love with Maddie Jones. He hated to admit it now. He was ashamed and embarrassed, but when she’d opened her door last night and he’d seen her standing there holding her cat, his heart had felt like the sun was warming him up from the inside. And he’d known. Known what it felt like for a man to love a woman. Known it in every cell in his body. Every beat of his heart. Then he’d carried her to her bed, and he’d known what it felt like to make love to a woman, and he’d been amazed.
Then she’d ripped his heart from his chest.
Mick tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He’d seen and done things in his life that he regretted. Experienced heart-wrenching pain at the deaths of fellow soldiers. But the things he’d done and experienced were not as bad as the regret and pain he felt over loving Maddie.
There was only one thing to do. He’d told her that he hadn’t thought about her mother and that he wasn’t going to think about her, and that was exactly what he planned to do. He was going to forget about Maddie Jones.
Meg opened her front door and looked into Steve Castle’s calm blue eyes. She’d taken a shower and he’d arrived just as she’d finished drying her hair. “I didn’t
know who else to call.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
He stepped inside and followed her into the kitchen. He wore a pair of jeans and T-shirt with a cornucopia and the words everybody hates vegetarians across his chest. Over a fresh pot of coffee, she told him what she’d learned from Mick.
“The whole town is going to find out, and I don’t know what to do.”
Steve wrapped his big hand around the mug and raised it to his mouth. “Doesn’t sound like there is anything you can do except hold your head up,” he said, then took a drink.
“How can I?” The last time she’d talked with Steve about Maddie Dupree Jones, he’d given good advice and made her feel better. “This is just going to keep everyone talking about what my mother did and all my father’s affairs.”
“Probably, but that isn’t your fault.”
She stood and moved to the coffeepot. “I know, but that won’t keep people from talking about me.” She reached for the coffee, then refilled Steve’s mug and hers.
“No. It won’t, but while they’re talking, you just keep telling yourself that you didn’t do anything wrong.”
She returned the coffeepot and leaned a hip against the counter. “I can tell myself that, but it won’t make me feel better.”
Steve placed a hand on the kitchen table and stood. “It will if you believe it.”
“You don’t understand. It’s so humiliating.”
“Oh, I understand about humiliation. When I returned from Iraq, my wife was pregnant and everyone knew the baby wasn’t mine.” He moved toward her, his limp barely noticeable. “Not only did I have to deal with the loss of my leg and my wife, but I had to deal with her being unfaithful with an army buddy.”
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Steve.”
“Don’t be. My life was hell for a while, but it’s good now. Sometimes you have to go taste the shit to appreciate the sugar.”
Meg wondered if that was some sort of army saying.
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